The Oxford Companion to the Mind
is an eclectic collection of entries by respected academics on topics in
psychology and philosophy of mind. 
Edited by Richard Gregory, it was first published in 1987, and this
second edition has many new entries, contributed by such notables as
Christopher Frith, David Chalmers, Daniel Dennett, Dylan Evans, David Papineau,
Ned Block, Simon Blackburn, Simon Baron-Cohen, and Sean Spence. It explains
central ideas in the study of mind, and gives many brief biographies of
important figures in the history of psychology.  Open the book on pages 400-401, for example, and you will find
entries on Herophilus (a Greek anatomist), heuristics, hippocampus,
Hippocrates, Thomas Hobbes, Sir Gordon Morgan Holmes (an Irish neurologist),
homeostasis and homunculus.  Each entry
is well written and some are illustrated with helpful diagrams or photographs.  The book is over 1000 pages long, and it is
full of fascinating information for the student of psychology. 

So I report with some reluctance
that after having had the first edition on my shelves for years and now having
had the second edition around for several months, I find it almost entirely
useless.  It has some disappointing gaps
— nothing on Romanticism or narrative for example — but even if it had
entries on those topics, I doubt that they would be useful because it is very
rare for any entries to be useful.  If
one already knows about the topic, then the entry adds nothing to one’s
knowledge.  If one does not know much
about the topic, then the entry is too brief to really expand one’s
knowledge.  Suppose you want to know
about Jaspers, for example.  The entry
tells us in its third sentence that "In his General Psychopathology
(1913) …, he argued that all normal and abnormal thoughts and behavior were
manifestations of human intentional orientation to its world and that only an
accurate description of conscious and semi-conscious states would rehabilitate
psycho-pathology."  For those with
some background in philosophy and psychology, this makes a certain amount of
sense but it is completely unclear what theories he is opposing.  Who would deny that thoughts and behavior
are related to our perspectives on the world? 
And what’s the difference between "thoughts and behavior" and
"intentional orientation? — are they not the same?, in which case the
sentence is completely uninformative. 
What parts of Jaspers’ writings should one read for further
clarification?  The entry does not
say.  The half page on him leaves one
knowing almost nothing more about the thinker. 
This is not to blame the author of the entry, because it is an
impossible task to give anything like a helpful summary of a major thinker’s
ideas in such a short space. 

Of course, there are some occasions
when one has unclear ideas about a concept or thinker, and it is useful to find
a quick explanation that clears up that confusion.  But for the most part, one would be much better off consulting a
textbook or a dictionary to get the information one is looking for.  Probably the people who will get the best
use out of The Oxford Companion to the Mind are those who are able to
just browse through its pages at random and glean some facts they hadn’t
previously known. 

© 2005 Christian Perring. All
rights reserved.

Christian Perring, Ph.D., is
Chair of the Philosophy Department at Dowling College, Long Island, and editor
of Metapsychology Online Review.  His main research is on
philosophical issues in medicine, psychiatry and psychology.

Categories: Philosophical, Psychology